news culture Dragon Ball: You don’t know the name of this character, but he has been around for years in the saga
While writing the Dragon Ball manga, Akira Toriyama always had crazy ideas for naming his characters. If he sometimes used names of vegetables, he always drew absurd ideas from right to left and in various and varied fields… like underwear! Long without a first name, we had to open our eyes in the game Dragon Ball Z Kakarot and closely monitor the mangaka’s interviews to finally know the identity of this character.
Dragon Ball, a manga marked by its characters
Between December 1984 and July 1995, Akira Toriyama will have drawn no less than 42 volumes to materialize one of the greatest works of his career and one of the most emblematic mangas of pop culture. For more than ten years, the mangaka has imagined a wide variety of characters, each with their own character and also their importance. Son Goku, Vegeta, Piccolo, Master Roshi, Broly, Master Kaiô, Karin, Mr. Popo, Mr. Satan, Yajirobé, Buu, … The list is as long as your arm, and it would take us hours to list them all. Even now, almost forty years after the original prepublication, manga enthusiasts are still looking for discoveries around dragonball.
Recently, a Twitter user took over the entire arc Majin Buu to establish a proper power ranking of all the protagonists and antagonists who intervene during chapters 421 to 519. Besides, speaking of characters, it’s a subject that still fascinates. In the span of seven separate arcs, from Son Goku’s training as a child to the final battle against Kid Buu, Akira Toriyama gave life to a whole bunch of protagonists who sometimes kept the mystery alive.
The secret of Bulma’s mother, a name revealed recently!
Few of Akira Toriyama’s characters have gone through the entire manga. In the list, Bulma acts as a pioneer since her meeting with Son Goku takes place from the beginning of the work, and more particularly from the first chapter. Quickly, they become friends and Son Goku, accustomed to living alone in nature, gradually discovers civilization and, above all, from chapter 69, technology through the brilliant inventions of the Capsule Corp, place of the greatest creations of Bulma’s father, Dr. Brief. If Goku therefore meets the genius inventor there, he also meets Bulma’s mother, long presented as being only “Madame Brief”.
Facetious, Akira Toriyama has always had funny ideas for naming his characters. In the case of Bulma, the young girl wears a name derived… from the vocabulary of underwear. Its original name translates to “Buruma” which is a panty short worn by Japanese women, and it even has a big sister called “Tights” which we discover in the one-shot Jaco the Galactic Patroller. Inevitably, this idea will spread with Bulma’s children who will be named Trunks (a reference to underpants) and Bra (a reference to a bra), but the origin goes back to Bulma’s parents! In English, the name Brief is one of the denominations used to designate a slip. However, and for a long time, Bulma’s mother never had the right to a first name. Asked about the subject in the past, Toriyama had explained that he hadn’t really managed to make a choice, jumping from one idea to another. Despite everything, if he had to decide, she would have been called “Panchy”, a derivative of panties which is another variant of the word panties. It is only in the game Dragon Ball Z Kakarot that her name has been formalized: it is Bikini.
